In this blog post, I am going to start building upon a very good project here and use it as a baseline for our thermography hardware.

Skills/Tools needed

Soldering kit/capabilities

Drill and drill bits to create space in box for sensors

Silicon putty for electronics and/or two-sided foam tape

Screwdriver, crimping tool, wire-cutter etc.

For collecting thermography data, we are going to use Raspberry Pi as the hardware platform. IR sensor of choice is 16×4 grid MLX90621 (Ordered on Digikey). For overlay purposes, we are going to use a raspi-camera which is easily available online. I ordered a Raspberry Pi case online for assembling the complete system. The total cost of the system is going to be ~$100.

For deployment, Raspberry Pi Zero W + FLiR Lipton in an industrial housing is a good choice with the total cost of the system in the range of $300 per unit.

I am going to assume that there are enough tutorial on the internet (and here) for you to assemble and put everything together.

Some tips

You’ll need space in your Raspberry Pi case, so order a case on the bigger side. I had to cut GPIO pins to allow me to fit everything together as I had ordered a smaller case (Looks nice, though).

Use softer wires for connecting/Soldering on PCB: This allows easier cable management inside the case.

Drill using small bit first and then go successively bigger till you can fit sensors.

Use two-sided tape and silicon putty to fit affix/sensors in the case.

Recommended is to use a heat-sink on the Raspberry Pi processor as it is going to get hotter in the case.

Finished hardware box looks like:

To make this hardware work, I am assuming that you have followed the original link posted in the beginning of this post. However, the code provided in the original link will not work. For latest code, please go to https://github.com/svtechie/mlxd